June 13, 2024

The latest in cancer news.... Three and a half weeks out from the surgery, the skin graft is healing well, as is the incision on my neck and the graft donor site on my thigh. It's been a lot, but for how involved the surgery was, the recovery has been easier than I expected.

Had a follow-up appointment with the radiation oncologist today to sign authorization for the radiation treatments. I have a follow-up on the surgery in a couple of weeks, and once the surgeon says everything is healed and gives the go ahead, I'll go in for scans so the radiation oncologist can map out the treatment sites. The treatments will be 4 - 5 days a week for 4 - 6 weeks, and they'll hit the areas around the graft site on my head and behind my ear where the lymph nodes were removed and down the left side of my neck. I'm told side effects will be feeling like I have a sunburn in the treated areas, some fatigue, and possibly some temporary dry mouth, sore throat, loss of taste on that side, and my beard will thin on that side.

The pathology after the surgery showed that malignant cells extended out to the ends in parts of what was removed in both areas. Radiation will take care of that on the scalp. On the neck, the consensus seems to be that I will likely need to go on immunotherapy, taking the drug pembrolizumab to take care of anything that may have moved beyond what was removed in surgery but may not have been detected. Pembrolizumab is is an antibody treatment that keeps cancer cells from blocking the immune system. It apparently is a very effective treatment. The downside is there's a risk my transplanted kidney could be damaged or even destroyed, but that's not a guaranteed outcome. I've been reading up a bit with my completely untrained eye and some people who'd had transplants and received this treatment saw no effect on their kidney at all, so it could go either way. But if it comes to it, I'll take losing the transplanted kidney if it means being alive with no cancer. I've seen what that shit does to a person, and I'll take kidney disease over that hell with no hesitation.

I'm still doing pretty well with all this emotionally and mentally. It's a lot, to say the least, but I've surprised myself with how I've been able mostly to take all these things as they come. Not that it isn't scary, or that it isn't hard, but I'm fairly okay considering it all.